Ugandan activists call on EU to move forward on due diligence law

Human rights lawyer Maxwell Atuhura and environmental activist Nick Omonuk have called on EU lawmakers to decide on a strong due diligence law so that they have an avenue to justice that is barred to them in Uganda.

The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) was first proposed by the EU Commission in early 2022. It’s purpose is to make large European companies responsible for environmental or human rights violations that happen along their value chains. The directive is currently in trilogue negotiations between the European Parliament and the EU Council.

“The directive is now at a make-it-or-breake-it moment,” European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ) policy officer Marion Lupin told journalists, noting that the positions of the Council and the Parliament were still very far apart.

To help argue the case for a strong due diligence law that is more than just a “box-ticking” exercise, the ECCJ invited Ugandan activists Atuhura and Omonuk to Brussels.

Flawed justice system

Atuhura is a human rights defender in the Ugandan Albertine region, who has closely followed the development of the Ugandan oilfields and of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and its effects on the region. The French oil company Total Energies is a majority shareholder in the project.

Representing people who have lost the grazing land of their animals to the pipeline project, Atuhura has found it impossible to gain fair access to the justice system for him and the people he represents.

After his petitions to the company and to authorities were disregarded, he said that the last option was to go to court.

“It is really hard to get justice in Uganda because the president has a lot of say in the decisions of the court,” Atuhura said, pointing to a case involving a refinery that was simply never heard. Moreover, several of his colleagues had suffered from repression from authorities, for example through a revocation of operating licenses, he said.

Disillusioned with the Ugandan justice system, the case was brought to a French court, as France has had a duty of vigilance law since 2017 and the involved company was headquartered in France.

To Atuhura’s disappointment, however, the case was rejected by the French court.

According to ECCJ’s Lupin, the judge had argued that the duty of vigilance law was too vague and didn’t provide him with enough detail and guidance to apply the law.

“As a French-trained lawyer, I believe that this is where the directive can bring an answer. Especially the Parliament’s position has a lot more details, a lot more criteria that could help in applying the law to these cases,” Lupin said.

Finance and the CSDDD

The Parliament’s and the Council’s positions on the CSDDD not only differ in detail and criteria, they also differ in their treatment of the financial sector. While the Parliament wants investors and lenders to be held accountable for environmental and human rights risks in their investments, the Council wants to keep them outside the scope.

Omonuk, an environmental activist from Uganda, is focused on this particular aspect. “There are so many interlinkages between the banks and these projects,” he said, mentioning the example of the Austrian Erste bank that helped finance Total Energies.

Like Atuhura, he has seen colleagues be intimidated and repressed for protesting against the pipeline project that is being developed in a national park.

“It’s important for you to know about our struggles so that you know how important such laws like the due diligence directive are to us to fight for justice,” he told journalists in Brussels.

Economic development or exploitation?

The two activists also had little patience for the argument sometimes brought forward by European companies that a strict CSDDD might impose such outsize risks and costs on companies that they might withdraw from risky countries and thus hurt their economic development.

Omonuk said that many of the Western projects were extractive in nature, like a crude oil pipeline that goes straight to a port for export without any value-adding processes that might create good jobs. The wealth from such projects ends up highly concentrated, landing in the hands of an elite few – while a much larger population must shoulder the environmental consequences, he argued.

Atuhura agreed, calling this model “total exploitation” and urging the EU to take a bold step in the opposite direction with the CSDDD. “Europe has much influence on the globe since law from Europe matters everywhere,” he said, adding that he hopes the EU would set “the path for the entire world to follow.”

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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